1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to displaying content on mobile devices. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems, methods, and computer program products for automatically updating the display of relevant content on a local mobile device when the relevant content changes at a remote device.
2. Background and Relevant Art
Users of mobile computing devices, such as cellular phones, pagers, and personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) often have access to large quantities of displayable content. For example, portions of content included in the World Wide Web are viewable on mobile computing devices. Additionally, mobile computing devices may display, via a browse based connection, proprietary content, such as stock quotes, sports scores, and headline news from other subscription-based services. A mobile computing device may also receive static text messages in the form of Short Message Service (“SMS”) messages that are stored in an inbox. Users of mobile computing devices may also use such devices to store personal information, such as appointments, calendars, contact lists, instant messages, and electronic mail messages.
Although the display area available for displaying content on mobile computing devices is small when compared to standard monitors, the display area continues to increase. Thus, users of mobile computing devices have the ability to view content from a variety of different sources simultaneously. While simultaneously displaying larger amounts of content is beneficial to users, there are problems inherent in current technology that may hinder users from efficiently displaying relevant content.
Conventional methods for mobile devices to view content often require a user to “go and get” the content they want. A user may do this by dialing into a network or using a permanent connection to browse through a series of menus or Uniform Resource Identifiers (“URIs”) in order to locate relevant content. Dialing into a network requires some amount of time for communication protocols to be initialized before a user may view content. Furthermore, there are often latency delays between the time a URI is selected and the time the corresponding information is retrieved. Additionally, there is often lower data transmission rates associated with wireless communication. Thus, when considering these delays, displaying relevant content using a wireless device may become time-consuming to a user of the wireless device.
Another problem in displaying relevant information results when mobile computing devices are pre-configured with a single display format. Many users do not wish to view the same data. For example, one user may wish to view continuous stock quotes and headline news, while a second user wishes to view sports scores and messages notifying them of the receipt of electronic mail. Furthermore, even the same user may wish to view different data at different times, perhaps viewing stock quotes at work and sports scores at home.
Users requesting different types of content may desire to be informed when relevant content changes. However, many data generating applications do not send notification of updates. When data-generating applications do not send notification, a mobile device has no way to know an update has occurred. As a result, a user of a mobile device may not be aware of updated content. In addition to receiving notification of updated content, users may also desire to automatically have updated content displayed on a mobile device. However as previously stated, current browsing technologies limit this capability, as a user must often browse a series of URIs to locate relevant information.
Therefore, what are desired are systems, methods, and computer program products for automatically updating the display of a mobile device when relevant content changes.